Five McLaren romantic pairings

What is it about the colour red that fires our passion? Okay, so we’ll not be playing ‘Lady in (Rocket) Red’ tonight, but we’ll still raise a toast to a partnership that has lasted through the years. McLaren’s unique brand of dayglo, eye-wateringly bright, blink-and-you-won’t-miss-it brand of rocket-red has been lighting up Formula 1 since the mid-1970s – and we, for one, couldn’t imagine the sport without it.

Truly, my love is like a (rocket-) red rose…

Ayrton Senna & McLaren MP4/4

Smooth, sleek, fast. How could you fail to be attracted to MP4/4 – dare we say it, the, er, sexiest of all McLarens? Ayrton Senna certainly couldn’t resist the car’s charms either – his pole lap at Imola in 1988 was an almighty 3.4s faster than the next fastest non-McLaren. That’s pretty darn sexy, too…

Lewis Hamilton & Fernando Alonso

The excitement, the danger, the sparks – they say opposites attract, but these two were so single-minded and similar that it seemed the converse were true. While it might be popular to pitch these two against each other, we know that you’d struggle to find two racers in the paddock with a higher mutual respect for each other. Deservedly so.

James Hunt & insert name here

Anybody who once raced with a badge stitched to their overalls proudly proclaiming ‘Sex: breakfast of champions’ certainly wasn’t unsure of his commitment to the opposite, uh, sex. But could we pin James Simon Wallis Hunt down to just one, singular, defining romance? No way…

McLaren & Monaco

Less of a relationship, more of a marriage, this one: few partnerships have achieved greater things than these two – we’ve won Monaco 15 times, with a string of names that reads like an F1 Who’s Who; Fernando Alonso, David Coulthard Mika Hakkinen, Lewis Hamilton, Alain Prost, Kimi Raikkonen, and, of course, Ayrton Senna.